Designing Your Website

5. Organising Your Material

5.1 The web is a dynamic medium. Change and update your content often.

• Changes to your home page signal to repeat visitors that there is something new to see on your site.
• Keeping the site looking fresh is especially important in consumer markets.

5.2 Make people feel welcome the moment they arrive at your home page.

• People usually know what they are looking for when they go to a business website. Let them know quickly that they are in the right place.
• Give visitors immediate payoffs - news, offers, or key information they will want.
• Make it clear straight away what your proposition is.
• Show what the site offers, with 'trailers' for important pages and forthcoming attractions.

5.3 Make regular customers feel special.

• Use restricted areas to allow-business customers to enter a password and see appropriate prices and discounts.
• Provide an opportunity for regular buyers to record their details permanently, rather than having to enter them on every visit. You can use 'cookies', tiny text files that you place on the customer's own hard drive, to store this information. But make sure you state you are doing so in your website's privacy policy (see Website and email law).

5.4 If you are selling online, design your site to make it easy to buy.

• Anticipate queries and give clear answers.
• Illustrate your products clearly.
• Make order forms easy to find and fill in.
• Reassure nervous buyers with convincing customer testimonials.
• Provide secure facilities for credit card purchases.
• Offer buyers an alternative way to transmit card details. For example, provide a form they can print out, fill in and fax to you.
• Spell out the terms of a generous guarantee.
• Provide clear statements of your data privacy policy and your policy on goods returned and exchanged.
• If you are hoping to make sales overseas, give details of p&p or shipping costs and taxes that are likely to apply. To give customers addedd confidence, include a contact name, your company address and telephone number.

5.5 Grouping different product ranges on different pages can make the bare data of 'page hits' statistics into valuable marketing information.

• You may sometimes get useful indications of customers' window shopping habits, as well as their purchases.