The 10 Commandments for Online Business Success

(Ms.) Jj,
Creative Director
Vision IPD

There are lots of businesses that succeed on the Internet… and many more that don’t. No one wants to throw good money at a bad idea, but if you don’t implement your business Internet presence in the right way, that’s just what you will be doing. Here are “ten commandments” that will ensure that you get off to the right start!

1. Get a good address. We all know the old saying about real estate: location, location and location, and take this into account when we go to rent a space for an office or store. The same principle holds true in cyberspace. When you set up shop with a web site name or address on Angelfire, Geocities, Tripod or MSN rather than getting your own unique address, you loose credibility. We talk to lots of online shoppers and find they are more willing to order from www.earthsongelementals than www.members.tripod.com/earthsongelementals. A short address, using your business name or product will not only be easier for your customers to remember, it will fit better on your printed promotional materials. Consult with a knowledgeable Internet design firm before you register that domain to avoid other pitfalls, like starting an address with “a” or “the”, or using easily misspelled words!

Make sure your domain hosting includes email as well. It is much more professional to have email to clients, customer and vendors originating from jsmith@earthsongelemenals than from teddybear24@hotmail.com or even jsmith@yahoo.com

2. Make your pages fly onto the screen. I’m willing to bet that you have clicked out of slow-loading web sites … and your potential customers will too! We find it amazing that even on broadband, some business sites are very slow to load, and we are certain that dial-up customers never see the pages. And yes, the majority of households still use dial-up access over broadband. Jupiter Research indicated that only 30% of households used broadband in 2003 and projected an increase only to 35% by 2004 and 46% by 2007.

It’s not hard to optimize pages. Properly size the images and optimize them with a program like Adobe’s Image Ready rather than using large images made smaller with code. Learn when to use .jpg images and when a .gif would be more appropriate. Writing clean, “tight” code also helps (and makes it easier to change and maintain the pages) but the biggest cause of slow loading pages is image bloat.

3. Make it professional! Your web page may be the only contact that potential customers have with you! You wouldn’t use bad photocopies of a brochure from 10 years ago to promote your business, nor would you use your reception room for a storage area or let your store windows get dingy. It is important that your web site be a “best foot forward” to represent your business, and it should harmonize with other promotional material. Because it’s likely to be seen by many more people than any other marketing tool, your web site should be the best “marketing brochure” your business has ever created.

4. Promote, promote, promote! The biggest fallacy on the web is the idea that “if I build it, they will come” as if by magic. Your print brochures won’t attract customers lying on your supply shelf and your web site can’t help if it's not promoted. We tend to think of the Internet as a medium for instant gratification, since when we look to it for information or products they are almost instantly at out fingertips. When you are on the other site – putting information and products out there – you have to realize that things take time. It takes time for the search engines to find and index pages. Yes, they have their information gathering “spiders” constantly crawling the World Wide Web… but the web is HUGE and even virtual spiders take time to crawl each strand. We tell clients to allow at least 6 months for traffic to build. During that time we suggest that they:

• Promote their web site at every opportunity.

• Add it to their business cards and stationery, print, radio and TV ads, brochures and mention it when talking to customers in person and on the phone.

• Make sure their web design contract includes individual, manual search engine submission and that their designer understands what it takes, behind the scenes, to make a site rank well on the search engines.

• Start collecting customer and potential customer email addresses to use in conjunction with Web marketing.

• Ask their web designer about other appropriate ideas for driving customers to the site.

5. Set goals. Determine what you want the site to accomplish and design it accordingly. Having realistic expectations will help you to develop a realistic budget for you site and not get carried away by the lure of fancy on-line bells and whistles that drive up the price but may not accomplish anything in terms of your online goals. In design school we were taught the maxim “Yes we can… but SHOULD we?” If you are not selling music, you probably don’t need a site that sings and dances. If you are not vending via the web, you do not need e-commerce capabilities.

Heck, you may not even need a web site! Not everyone does, however there are unethical sales persons who will try to sell you one anyway.

Our favorite “internet horror story” is of a small, neighborhood bridal shop in Oregon. They were sold a “web page” and had been paying monthly for the service for almost a year. No one that called had said “we found you on the web” and they were wondering what they were getting for their money. When we looked into the matter, we found they had been sold a single page that was buried on a large “community information” site. It did not show up in any Google search and in a site search for “bridal shop” you got a page of “sponsor” sites (those that had paid a premium for this status) followed by pages of non-sponsor sites, in alphabetical order. Because their business name was at the END of the alphabet, it’s a sure bet NO ONE found them that way.

We did find their page, and clicked on the email link to let them know we had found them, and would be by later to discuss our suggestions. When we visited the business later in the week we asked if they had received the email. “What email?” was the reply. “How can we get email without a computer?” they asked! Yes, truly…no one in the family had a computer and the salesman had not bothered to inquire – or to explain how they could access their messages if anyone did find their page! Needless to say the contract was not renewed and the next year they expanded their print advertising in their local community papers, with much success.

6. Contact! It is important to put as much contact information as possible on your website. While you may personally want to hide behind the anonymity of the Internet, that doesn’t work for a business. Many customers do research on the web, and then phone or visit the business in person. Even folks making online purchases feel reassured when they know there is a “brick and mortar” business behind the cyber-presence. It helps them feel like you are not just going to vanish with their money, and gives them an avenue to resolve problems, should there be any.

I personally will not consider doing business with anyone who only has an email address – or mailto form – as a means of contact on their web site and I have never actually patronized any online merchant who does not also have phone and physical location information on their site that actually cross-references with the phone book.

7. Affiliation. Depending on your business, it might be advantageous and appropriate for you to consider an affiliation with other online merchants of related merchandise. If you sell teddy bears, for example, you might join Amazon.com’s affiliate program, but rather than running ad banners or buttons, which cheapen the look of your site, consider showing a selection of books about teddy bears, with a link to Amazon.com for customers to buy them. You also get a larger percentage of the sale from Amazon when handled this way, too!

Banner exchanges, however, do not seem to actually drive real customers to sites and “web rings” and web awards which were once popular now very much brand a site as “amateur.” Reciprocal links with pages that relate well to your content and have good search engine ranking can help to not only increase traffic but also improve search engine placement, if handled correctly.

8. Keep it up… and up to date! It is important that folks be able to consistently find your site and equally important that the information on it be current and fresh. Hosting with a reliable company with a history of good “uptime,” and a good support team will go a long way toward eliminating “down time” worries. Do check your site frequently, and do not hesitate to contact your web host if there appear to be problems. Be polite, but they need to know and a good host will be responsive and will be able to give you some idea of what the problem is and when it will be resolved, if it can’t be fixed instantly.

And adding new products, or new content (like these articles!) to your site on a regular basis will not only give viewers a reason to keep coming back, it will also give the spiders new food for thought, which helps your search engine ranking.

9. Use the K.I.S.S. principle. Keeping a website simple goes a long way to giving it a professional look! Complex backgrounds, cute graphics that move “just because they can,” sounds, movies, and pictures of the grand kids, dog and vacation probably don’t have a place on your business site. Many businesses do share selected bits of information about owners and employees as part of an “about us” page, but be selective! A small animation, used selectively, can draw attention to a special offer or event, but making every image move, text flash, using distracting backgrounds or type faces that make the text hard to read make viewers think they have stepped out on the wrong side of a time machine. If you want to play, use a personal page that can link to your business but I wouldn’t necessarily suggest a link BACK.

10. Remember, they don’t KNOW you yet. It’s amazing how many small business sites leave you wondering, “What do they DO?” If you are a doctor, make sure your site is clear about your specialty; you don’t want folks calling to make appointments for back-to-school physicals if you’re an orthopedic surgeon. If you sell plumbing parts wholesale only, make sure you say so and save everyone some hassle. Remember, too, that unlike an office or a store, on the Internet not everyone comes to your site through the “front door” or index page. All of your pages need to work together with clear navigation and identification for those who arrive on a secondary page via a search term.

Of course these ten commandments don’t come with the guarantee “do this and make millions on the Internet!” But we can say that following these guidelines will give your business a professional web presence that will benefit your company and your customers.

For a free consultation to see how your business can benefit from professional design services on the Internet or in print, contact Vision IPD Incorporated, PO Box 2497, Bangor, ME, 04402. phone 207.433.0687 or email vision(at)visionipd.com