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Articles - Business Web Site Design Tips

 For the typical business, the definition of a good web site is one that makes money. You may choose to have either a “strategic business” web site or an “e-commerce” web site.  A strategic site is one that does not offer an online merchant shopping cart but effectively creates the following:

	Market place recognition
	Value (your content is timely and valuable)
	Establishes trust (addresses issues of your
	professional abilities and how you deal with customers)
	Duplicates your “store” in their home
	Contains a “direct response” call to action regarding your
	products and services
	Is a strong and firm foundation for your business

For the purposes of this article, we will examine strategies for designing a successful strategic business site and address e-commerce sites in a future issue. When would your strategic site be considered successful? When it:

	Generates new business you otherwise would not have had
	Saves time by answering questions you would have had to do in person
	Is considered a resource by your customers
	Revenue generated from new web-related business returns your initial start-up time and dollars invested
	Continuing revenue returns a minimum of 3 t 5 times your ongoing cost of time and money

 It has been interesting to hear the responses of potential customers all across the country regarding the prospect of putting up a web site for their stores.  We hear everything from “I am not sure that this web stuff works ”, to “I don’t need a site because I am not planning to ship furniture across the United States” to “I don’t want a site because I will get more calls”. (I also hear “beam me up” and “I am psyched!”) The objections are valid and should be planned for.  So how do you create a strategic site that makes a profit, saves you time, and lowers nuisance calls? Read on.

 Content is King!

An online furniture showroom is a must! A strategic site is designed to sell furniture in the store’s local effective service area! So fill your online showrooms with a cross section of your best selling items and add price ranges and dimensions.  Imagine this scenario.  Mr. and Mrs. Surfer are looking for desk for their son Johnny. It is 10:00 at night. They do a search and come across an unfinished furniture store site.  Good news, a store they did not even know about is within 30 miles. They click. There is a picture of the store, a map and directions. Oh, there is a picture of the owners hugging each other. “Isn’t that cute!” “Let’s go right to the desks” says Mr. Surfer. “What, no furniture?  We’d like to get an idea of what is available and if there is anything in our price range and if there is a desk that will fit in his room…….guess we will have to call.” Online prospects expect lots of content and you had better give it them.  Just think, people can shop from their homes while you are sleeping! To lower ongoing site maintenance expenses, we recommend that my clients put a price range at the top of each showroom. For example, beds from $189, night stands from $129, armoires from $400 and so on.  Cindy Burr from Burr’s Unfinished Furniture in Bryan Texas, says she gets calls every day from people asking “do you have a site so I can start my shopping from home?”  Another customer commented that she frequently gets requests from her customers for a web address so the other spouse can check on the purchase decision without coming into the store. And as Dave Morgan from Unfinished Furniture Warehouse in Fruitland, Maryland says, “if you can’t see it, you ain’t got it, and most people won’t ask.  Some do but most don’t.”  In addition, be a resource. Have information about staining techniques, wood species, tips on purchasing unfinished furniture, etc. 

You Site Should Invoke Direct Response Behavior

Over a million dollars of e-commerce sales on the Internet has revealed to us the basic ingredients of what makes a web site successful as a “direct response” marketing tool. Before we continue, let’s define a “direct response” web page as any part of a web site where the visitor is directed to “take action”—whether it be pick up the phone and call, visit your showroom, e-mail for more info, or fill out an order form.   How do we stack the odds in our favor that visitors to our site will respond in a way that we want them to?  To answer that, let’s take a look at the two key ingredients of web pages that are experiencing the most success in producing a favorable direct response from the customer.

The web page must load fast... the faster the better.  The customer benefit must be clear, compelling, and stated early in the message.  

Lets face it, we have all waited for web pages that seem to take forever to load... and before it gets better, the Internet will get even slower for a while due to the increase in demand for bandwidth.  Because of this, it is critical that your potential customer not be forced to wait to receive your message. If you make them wait, two very bad things can happen. They may become impatient and “click away” to another site.  Or if they stay around to “wait”, they experience frustration which clouds their mood of receptivity toward your offer... and makes them reluctant to “click” your next link after having experienced waiting for the last page to load.

Let’s look at the function and file size of Logos, Images, Backgrounds, and Icons. These are the components that usually slow down page loading considerably... and I am constantly amazed at the huge percentage of direct response websites that include items that are unnecessary distractions to the page message and, in many cases, actually detract from the message.

Creating a Fast Loading Website!

Design Tips

The good basic written resource is a book titled Web Style Guide by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton.  It is filled with basic design principles for creating web sites. You might want to pick up a copy. 

Logos - Although it is important that you appear to be professional, it usually does NOT require that your logo be 32K and take up the entire top of the page.  One of the first things we usually have to do when taking over a previously built site is to decrease the resolution of the logos down by as much as 2/3’s!  The fact is, most people don’t care about your logo as much as YOU do. They mostly want to know “what benefit you have to offer them” and how can you help them “solve their problem”. For this reason, you should confine your logo to only about one-third of the top of the page, either centered or offset to the left with a compelling headline close by.

Images - Pictures should only be used if they are essential to the offer (or confined to pages that are considered optional, such as an “about us” page with pictures of your store and personnel). For instance, a furniture picture would be classified as essential. If you are selling furniture, your site visitor will expect to see pictures of furniture and the picture’s purpose is to make the site visitor contact you, visit your store or fill out a form to buy the furniture. All of your images should be geared to motivate your site visitor to take one of those two very specific actions.  The quality of the image is important - here is a perfect chance for manufacturers to improve sales and really showcase their furniture products in front of millions of people across America!  People are very visual, and respond to good-looking pictures.  And white backgrounds on the pictures are the best – they just jump off the page!

No junk! Contrary to public opinion, entertainment items such as JavaScript and animated gifs do not enhance direct response results! In many cases they produce just the opposite effect by detracting from your message. Just because you can do something does not necessarily mean that you should.  We recently saw an unfinished furniture store that was like star wars, filled with flying images and flashing icons.  And you waited and waited for the show to finish! The first generation websites were loaded with flashing images, but the best sites you see today contain little or none.

Image size: 10K - 20K - acceptable if the picture is really important 20K - 30K - the picture better be darn important. Over 30K - forget it—find a way to make it smaller or put it on a different page with a thumbnail link to it. With unfinished furniture showrooms, the best way to display inventory rapidly for the inpatient surfer is with 1K or 2K thumbnails. The visitor can quickly scan your showroom to see if there is anything there they want, and download only those items they are interested in. This type of site is a little more work to set up, but the results pay off.  There are some sites out there now that you could wear your mouse out on with gratuitous clicking and clicking and clicking.

The same advice goes for image maps, menus, icons, etc.  These should be tiny, whenever possible under 1K; and seldom larger than 3K.

Here is a trick to remember. Whenever possible use the same background, logo, icons, and images throughout your site. By doing so, these graphical elements will load faster each subsequent time due to the ability of modern web browsers to store content they have already seen.

Another guideline -the overall file byte content of your page, which includes text and all other components should ideally be no larger than 20K to 30K, but smaller is always better, assuming of course that you can create your compelling offer within such limitations.  Understandably, some “image dependent” sites such as unfinished furniture store showrooms cannot be designed within these restrictive guidelines and that will work provided that everything on your page is essential to your offer and you have made every effort to optimize the page’s loading speed.

Margins: Margins provide important visual relief in any document, but careful design of margins and other “white space” is particularly important in web page design because web content must coexist on the computer screen with the interface elements of the browser. Backgrounds with a left hand margin present a professional image with the added benefit of making the text easier to read—since the lines are shorter and more resemble a magazine’s familiar format. 

Intuitive Interface: People still read from left to right.  Don’t make visitor search to the right or all over the page for menu buttons and links.

Legibility: Plain backgrounds work best.  Take a look at www.crateandbarrel.com or www.citibank.com. White, or off-white backgrounds are still the most acceptable and are the easiest to read. Many unfinished furniture store sites use a wood grain background, making them very difficult to read. NEVER use reverse type and NEVER use all caps. Whether you use uppercase or lower case letters has a strong effect on the legibility of your headline. We read primarily by recognizing the overall shape of words, not by parsing each letter then assembling a recognizable word.
Tree   Boy    Dog

Words formed with capital letters are monotonous rectangles that offer few distinctive shapes to catch the eye.
MONOTONOUS  Vs Monotonous

Some typefaces are more legible than others on the screen.  A traditional typeface such as Time Roman is considered to be one to the most legible on paper, but at screen resolution its size is too small and its shapes look irregular. Times New Roman is a good example of a traditional typeface that has been adapted for use on computer screens. Typefaces such as Georgia and Verdana were designed specifically for legibility on the computer screen, however they are not a good choice for text-heavy documents that will be printed to read on paper. I prefer to use Times New Roman with Bold Arial to set off the headlines for contrast.  Although the use of color is another option of differentiating type, colored text, like underlining, has a special functional meaning in web documents. Avoid putting colored text within text blocks because readers will assume the colored text is a hypertext link and click on it.

The customer benefit must be clear, compelling, and stated early in the message.

Simply put... if the customer does not find a benefit early in your page, they will usually NOT respond. This is a fact. To debate it in marketing is equivalent to debating the merits of 2+2=4 in mathematics.  Debate ended. The benefit should be stated in a headline at the top of the page and should NOT have to compete with your logo. The customer wants to know...”what’s in it for me”—tell them; right away! Then continue on to explain how your product or service will solve their problem or improve their quality of life, and why they should do business with you.  If instead, like in so many other poorly designed websites, you choose to headline your company’s mission statement, how long you have been in business and other such platitudes, you will lose most customers...  because they do NOT care about you until they find out that you actually have something that will solve their problem or improve their quality of life.

Choices should be limited to taking action and should always represent a step toward closing the sale.

Most web pages offer too many choices. Because of the nature of “hypertext” linking, web designers feel compelled to give visitors a plethora of opportunities to “click away” before the product or service message has been fully delivered. This is one of the most common mistakes being made on the internet today. Everything on your page from that “Netscape” button to that “our favorite links” is competing with your message for the site visitor’s attention.

You should very carefully consider where your links are sending your site visitors... and if you are looking for your visitor to take action on your offer, then you should only include choices that will facilitate the buying decision right within your own web site.

Even more ineffective are the web pages that offer too many choices The truth is, most people are yearning to be led. Help them. By offering too many choices, you only assist them in making the easiest decision in the world—which is no decision... and that is very bad for business! The hardest objection in the world to overcome is “I’ll think about it”.

Back to…. a good strategic business site makes money!  How do you know that web-generated traffic is producing sales? The old-fashioned way – from customer commentary.  A hit counter is useless.  A “hit” can be nothing than a surfer waving a mouse over a graphic on your page and then moving on.  You can get reports on how many “significant visitors” (visitors that moved methodically from page to page in your web) your site has had, but still, the best way is to encourage customers to speak up.  Offer to give away something free, such as a half pint of stain or a finishing video, with their first purchase if they mention your web site. In addition, have an email response mechanism set up so people can contact you with inquiries that should lead to sales.  

Last – use a little humor to make the medicine go down.  We love Dave Morgan’s site at www.unfinishedwarehouse.com.  Take a look at his “about us” page and his specialized delivery truck. We just can’t be too serious!

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