Location, Location, Location

The single most important piece of information on a local business's Web site is its address, including city or town, state or province, country, and Zip or postal code. This needs to be on every page, easily readable by anyone who finds that page through a search engine or personal referral. The Web is truly World Wide, and search technology is imperfect. A potential client trying to find a real estate agent in Baltimore, County Cork, Ireland, is also going to get search engine referrals to agents in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, and probably to many agents in places that don't have "Baltimore" in their names.

Realizing that the Web is truly World Wide seems to be the hardest mindset change for local businesses that are just moving onto the Internet. When writing a flier to be hand-distributed in the immediate neighborhood, an ad for placement in a local newspaper, a TV spot that is going to run only on local stations, or a local telephone directory listing or ad, there is no need to say what country you're in, or, in most cases, what state or province. You can safely assume that nearly 100% of a local ad's readership is going to be located near your business, and potential customers will automatically assume your business is local to them as well. This is, of course, a false assumption on the Internet. No one knows where you are unless you explicitly tell them, and you must give them your full telephone number too, including area or region code and, if appropriate for your business, the country code as well, because one of the great reasons Web users search for local businesses is that they are moving or traveling to a place for which they don't have local print directories handy, and are trying to arrange for essential services at their new location before they leave the old one.

Like Everything Else, Simplicity Has Its Limits

The fictitious business promotion site shown in Figure 4-1 is an example of usability taken to an unhealthy extreme. An all-text page like this will load in the blink of an eye over even the slowest modem connection, and it is certainly easy to navigate; all the links are underlined, and all underlined words are links, in accordance with the most basic usability rules.

Figure 4-1. The world's simplest promotional Web site.

But if you came across a page that looked like this while searching the Web for (yes, I'm making this up) Rotary Relinearizing Equipment, would you give this site a second glance?

Probably not.

Any quality, including simplicity, can be taken too far.