Once you get customers to your site, make sure it’s a site you’re proud of. Keep it clean and uncluttered. First impressions are important and provide opportunities to immediately engage visitors with information that meets their needs.

Begin by providing a brief description of who you are, including the products and services that you offer, along with language that relates to the visitors need or problem. Don’t give people a reason to leave your site too early. Addressing their “pain issues” up front rather then burying them deeper in your site will encourage visitors to stay longer. Avoid industry speak, and keep your history and mission statement off the home page, reserving this valuable real estate to tell visitors how you can help them. Make the site easy to navigate and the source of relevant content that is short, simple and to the point. Online shoppers want to find valuable information quickly.

Tie product information to the needs of your customers. Speak to them about the features and benefits that are important to them, not just those that appeal to engineers. Customers want to know how you can solve the humidity problem in their homes or help alleviate their allergies, not how easy it is to access a compressor in an air conditioner.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs) also can enhance your Web site. In addition to influencing purchase decisions, a well-developed FAQ section can help customers distinguish between problems they can correct themselves and situations that require professional attention. The right FAQ section can position you as a helpful resource instead of a roadblock to information.

As you organize the content on your Web site, make use of all the resources that are available to you. For example, if you are a wholesaler or dealer, most original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) would be happy to provide Web quality photos of their equipment. OEMs also can provide tools to help your customers make educated decisions. By linking them to OEM Web sites for product and general industry education, you take advantage of the flash presentations, calculators and other interactive tools that these much larger companies have already developed.

Streaming videos and flash presentations, whether they reside on your site or an OEM site, can be highly effective tools for explaining complicated technology and troubleshooting problems. But when used poorly, they can cheapen your image. Don’t get too caught up in new technologies at the expense of content. Remember to focus on information rather than animation as you deliver your message.

In the third part of this series, titled “Advance Sales via the Web Part 3” I’ll address some of the extras that you should consider to help along the sales process.