Websites have become the go-to medium for casual information gathering. Google, Wikipedia, Technorati, and other massive information harvesters offer the world near infinite information at near-instant speeds. When people hear about a company, they type in the URL. Because of this, providing as much information about the business and its offerings is a critical ingredient in successful websites and marketing in general when content is available, people will consume it.

Most users who go through the trouble of finding a particular company are likely going to click on the Products link in the main menu. They should be rewarded with a landing page that focuses on actual product offerings, and doesn't display large, Flash-based introductory animations, wander down tangents talking about company history, or do anything else that detracts from the carefully crafted sales message. In other words, do not deviate from the selling path.

Few sections benefit more from building content than the products or services. Not only does it inform the audience, which is very likely the customer base, but it presents an ideal marketing platform and selling opportunity. If people are already on your site, why not push them into action?

The Products and Services pages should be built with a selling path in mind. A selling path is an easily followed, short series of actions that leads people to initiate the sales process. Ideally, this should be three tangible steps:

1. Landing page: People will find the products or services landing page, be enamored with all the wondrous things the company manufactures, sells, or consults about, and click on an item for deeper exploration.
2. Individual description: Prospects will find themselves on a singular page that describes in no uncertain detail all of the salient selling points of the product or service. This page guides them toward the final stage of the selling path: the sales process.
3. Acquisition: After readers consume everything about the product or service that catches their eye, they will effortlessly find themselves on a page that (politely) asks them to finish what they started, either by making a purchase or becoming a qualified lead by making contact with the company.

Product page design
A company whose primary line of business is selling tangible products will find its catalog of items falling into three fairly distinct categories:

1. Products that can be sold on the web: Just about anything that can be shipped and delivered cost-effectively can be sold via an online shopping cart, from fruit baskets to furniture to cars. These products do not need the help of a sales force. Customers can make a purchase online without interacting with the company.
2. Products that could be sold via the web but are not: Many corporate websites describe products that could feasibly be sold online but are not because the company chooses to distribute them in other ways. Many food manufacturers do not sell their products online because they have exclusive distribution deals with grocery stores and other retail outlets.
3. Products that cannot realistically be sold through a shopping cart: These products simply can't be delivered without a huge expense (such as a luxury fishing boat) or without intense customization (enterprise-grade software).

The product landing page
Most users who go through the trouble of finding a particular company are likely going to click on the Products link in the main menu. They should be rewarded with a landing page that focuses on actual product offerings, and doesn't display large, Flash-based introductory animations, wander down tangents talking about company history, or do anything else that detracts from the carefully crafted sales message. In other words, do not deviate from the selling path.

There are several key pieces of content that should appear in a product listing. Depending on the complexity of a company's offerings, some of these might be more feasible than others, but all will add value to the customer experience:

• Retain a specific description of the displayed product line: If a page describes only one product line, ensure that the content discusses what is being shown on the page, not the greater family of products.
• Include a product-specific search feature: If the catalog is deep or old, or contains many variations of pieces, it will help users find the perfect product faster if you give them a dedicated search feature where they can query model numbers, dimensions, keywords, and more. Traversing even the most elegantly designed hierarchy is slower than the type-click-find speed of a search engine.
• Make sure the depth of the section's architecture is accurately demonstrated: In other words, make sure all product categories are represented and any subcategories are within easy clicking distance.
• Include a way of highlighting particular products: These products might be on sale, or recently released, or coming soon, but users love "featured products" because they often take the guesswork out of where to go from the landing page.

As with the corporate website's homepage, these elements have to be carefully arranged to help users find their way around the product catalog. The goal is to direct users. If done well, visitors will rely on the design and copy of the product landing page to guide them.

The individual product page
Once your reader has found your website and navigated through the product landing page, they will arrive on a singular web page dedicated to the product in which they are (hopefully) most interested. This is where web design and copywriting skills come into full play, and where simple marketing messages have to work in tandem with technical descriptions.

An individual product page should offer a comprehensive overview of the product, including photos, testimonials and reviews, dimensions, availability, and technical specifications. Anything and everything about that specific product should be present and accounted for. The last thing your visitors want is information about the product scattered around the site, so make sure every detail is centralized, focused, and accessible.

Description. The length of a product description is subject to just about every marketing variable out there: how much there is to actually say, how many vice presidents of marketing are involved, how long the marketing people want the description, how far the writer can then condense the text for easier web viewing, how much technical information to mix in with the sales copy, how old the coffee is in the coffee maker, and whether there's a full lunar eclipse this month.

Photos, images, and diagrams. People love pictures. It doesn't matter if they're professional photos or poorly lit Polaroids, glossy diagrams or low-resolution screenshots when people shop online, they want to see some substantial evidence that the product that has caught their interest actually exists. Smart companies understand this, and put their best marketing foot forward to make available the best images possible. As you can see in Figure 7-4, M-Audio understands that their audience wants to see every nook and cranny of their devices. They make sure that their product pages contain high-resolution, professional images that give a very good sense of the products' look and feel. (They also allow users to click on an image to bring up another screen with even bigger images and more detail.)

At a minimum, users should see a thumbnail of the product. This does not have to be elaborate. To avoid forcing users to squint, make sure that the image is at least 150 pixels wide. Providing a larger image when the thumbnail is clicked is almost always a good idea. This higher-resolution version should appear in a new browser window, not because this constitutes better usability (which it really doesn't), but because people expect and accept this functionality that has been perpetuated by thousands of websites.

Generally, opening links in new windows is regarded as bad usability and accessibility practice, but in this case, users expect a thumbnail to open a new window with a larger image. The one and only concrete rule about this entire discussion is to never make a thumbnail link to an image that is not bigger. If a higher-resolution version with increased detail is unavailable, do not link the thumbnail.

Occasionally readers are provided more than one high-resolution image. If you are providing an individual link to each, the anchor text of the links must be explicit, so readers know what they are clicking to. (You might even provide miniature thumbnails next to each, but make sure actual text accompanies the small images, otherwise the audience will just see a group of ambiguous pictures.)

Supporting content. While just about every product has a description, and most have a picture or two, it is often worth supplementing that core content with material that might be of interest to the reader. Ideally, an individual product page should contain everything a reader could possibly want to know about the item, including the following:

• Case studies or testimonials: We'll cover third-party validation later in the book, but this is a perfect place to include some words from satisfied customers.
• News items: This might include press releases issued by the company, independent write-ups and reviews of the product itself, or interviews with key corporate figures.
• Technical documents: Whitepapers, technical specifications, best practice documents, or anything else that might appear to a narrower segment of the readership could be added as well. These are typically in PDF or Microsoft Word format, but could also be converted to HTML.
• Marketing collateral: These are the two-page datasheets of multi-page booklets that serve to market the product in the physical world. While these can complement the page's primary marketing copy, be careful of overly redundant messaging.
• Related products: If a particular product is part of a greater portfolio, or if it's designed to work in tandem with other independent programs (like the main applications that comprise Microsoft Office), it would be helpful to link to them right from the relevant product page so the reader can understand the context of the item they are reviewing.

Shopping cart link. Your site is going to either have e-commerce capability or not. If it doesn't, but your company relies on a network of distributors, you should point people to the place where they can find a dealer or reseller.

If your site does have e-commerce meaning that people can fill out a shopping cart and pay for the items without leaving the domain it's imperative to provide users the ability to add items to their cart with a single click from the context of the individual product page. Try at all costs to avoid a separate shopping area, where users have to search for the products all over again in order to make a purchase.

In creating a link or button to the shopping cart, a user can never have too much information. If the link is driving them to a third-party site to capture the purchase (such as Google Checkout or PayPal), tell them where they are going. Also, state the price of the product right on its page. Revealing the cost up front will lead to fewer abandoned shopping carts.

Services page design
Almost all the design and content guidelines from products are just as applicable to services. A company's service landing page needs to be sexy and marketing-savvy, and not just list the services, but provide an introduction that generates interest in the reader even before they commit a click.

Like product pages, individual service pages should have a thorough description, supporting information, and as many images as possible to help convey the weight of the marketing message. Testimonials, case studies, and other pieces of independent validation play a big role in pushing users into fulfilling the call to action.

Because users cannot make a spontaneous buying decision, this supporting content becomes all the more critical, which is why services pages can be long and saturated with detail. Also, most companies will offer fewer services than products; managing a few hundred products in an online catalog is relatively easy compared to the nightmare of managing more than a dozen unique services. Clients will deliberate forever before purchasing a service, and many of them will consume every word of supplemental text available.

Redefining the call to action
The lack of the shopping cart, which is the key ingredient to impulse buying, also forces a company to consider their call to action more carefully. A call to action (also called a "call to forward" in some circles) is a directive you provide the prospect it presents to them the next step you would like them to take. They are most commonly found in pure advertising such as e-mail marketing where you are trying to make a hard sell, such as "Buy now and save 20 percent off your purchase!"

For a shopping cart?based site, calls to action are easy: add the products to your cart and then buy them. For service-based companies, calls to action have to be more marketing and less sales in nature. The language and suggested steps are more subtle; you can't push people to buy a service on the spot, so you have to ask them to take another iterative step. Some examples include the following:

• Ask the readers to make contact with you: By pushing them to your contact page (or providing an e-mail link or miniature contact form right on the product page itself), you are receiving permission to contact them directly. Make sure you capture their vital information: name, e-mail, phone, and areas of interest.
• Offer the opportunity to download additional marketing materials: This might be technical whitepapers, case studies, or full product brochures as long as it's relevant and valuable to the reader. For particularly significant content such as long, technical whitepapers or third-party ROI studies, you may want to ask the reader to give their name and e-mail address in exchange.
• Provide a means for readers to stay up to date about the service: The simplest way is an e-mail mailing list or an RSS feed, but you may also offer a traditional mailing list as well, depending on the nature of the business.

Language and design. The language and design of the call to action is important. The verbiage has to be action-oriented, specific, short, and bordering on bossy. You're not out to beg; you're out to clearly indicate the next task the reader should take. Let's take our preceding examples. Instead of saying "Please fill out our contact form so we have your information on file and can let you know when we have our next demo scheduled," be direct: "Contact us to schedule a one-on-one demo with a company representative." For the newsletter, you can be just as direct. "Submit your e-mail to stay up to date about our service" is better than "If you give us your name and e-mail address, we'll periodically send you an update about our services."

Choose words that incite action: submit, contact, register, watch, learn, download, click, get, view, and so forth. While in truth you are asking for users to give up their contact information, you want to be politely demanding in order to spur action.

Summary

Like most things in web design, there is no hard-and-fast formula that works all the time. In fact, a corporation's Products and Services section is one of the least likely to fall into any convention because there are so many possible things to sell, and because there are so many ways to present the offerings, no two sections are alike. An investment in high quality content and design are going to be absolutely key in this section, as they directly influence the perception of the material, and thus the success of the company's products or services in the marketplace.

For more information on how netlink can help you to go for an effective Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites click here to contact an account manager@netlink today.

Author Kevin Potts
Reference:
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/web_design_for_business_websites/