Get to the Point Right Away

Since we're going to concentrate on selling, the first thing we want a potential customer to see on our site is our merchandise, just like a store window. We don't want to force potential customers to wade through a "welcome to our site" message of any kind, let alone a slow-loading animated one, before showing off our wares. Look at the color ad inserts in a Sunday newspaper. Their covers launch straight into their sales messages, usually with some sort of special offer or sale. If there is any institutional message on that insert's cover, it is usually stuck in one of the lower corners of the page, below plenty of "buy now" copy and product illustrations.

The only sites that need to display pictures of CEOs or VPs on their front pages are run by consulting or seminar companies that sell their corporate officers' expertise directly to clients. Retail-level purchasers looking for good deals on DVD players or toys to give to young relatives as gifts are more interested in the items they want to buy than in the corporate infrastructure behind the company selling them. A few words about that infrastructure and the people behind it should be on the site somewhere that's what "about" pages are for but should not be the first thing a potential customer sees.

A site section containing an "animated tour" of the company or its offerings, with a prominent link to that page on the site's main page, may not be a bad thing, but forcing customers to sit through an animated presentation as a condition of viewing products or services you offer is not going to increase sales. If you are selling software, the first thing a visitor to your site will want to know is what software you have for sale, an idea of its functions, and what kind of systems can use it. These are all necessary pieces of information for potential purchasers.

The NoteTab site's front page, shown in Figure 3-1, is a near-perfect online software marketing machine. It tells us what NoteTab does and what variations of it are available. We see a series of award icons that tell us, in essence, "An awful lot of people who test software for a living say NoteTab is good stuff." We have easy links to every bit of information we need to buy NoteTab or, if we prefer, download a free "light" version to test before we lay out money for either the "Pro" or "Standard" version. This site has no splash page, and the only illustrations on it are small and have few colors, so it loads rapidly on any Internet connection. It uses no Javascript, Java, Flash, or anything else beyond simple HTML, so it displays correctly in any popular browser running any common operating system.

Figure 3-1. NoteTab home page.

The NoteTab "About Us" page, shown in Figure 3-2, is not thick with information, because this is a simple company with a small and simple product line. It is exactly as informative as it needs to be and no more. It tells us that NoteTab has been around since 1995, that it is produced by Fookes Software, a private company that was founded by Eric G.V. Fookes, and that the company has strict policies about customer privacy and satisfaction. We see links to several other Fookes software products, contact information, and, on the left side of the page, the same simple navigation links we saw on the home page they are on every page on the site that will take us instantly to any other piece of information about NoteTab that might help us decide to buy it.

Figure 3-2. NoteTab "About Us" page.

The NoteTab site uses information layering well; we start with the basics on the home page, and if we're interested we can easily move to pages that go deeper into each program's features displayed as fast-loading text, with the option of slow-loading, but with more informative, full-page screenshots. We can learn as much or as little as we want about the three NoteTab versions, including price data, with only a few clicks, and we are never more than a single link away from the "Buy Now" page, where you have a choice of several methods of payment and product delivery (see Figure 3-3).

Figure 3-3. NoteTab "Buy Now" page, partial view.

No one is going to call the NoteTab site a thing of beauty. From an artistic standpoint, "clunky" is probably the kindest single word we can use to describe it. But as a sales tool, it is totally effective and, because it is so simple and takes up so little server space and uses so little bandwidth to deliver, it is about as cost-effective as a Web site can get. The basic design hasn't changed in years, and the only copy on it that changes at all frequently is the "news" section on the home page, which carries nothing but news about NoteTab itself, not news about HTML editors in general or HTML developments.

Fookes Software doesn't handle its own order processing. This function is subcontracted. Since Fookes isn't handling credit cards, checks, or product delivery in-house, the company doesn't need to worry about keeping customer credit card numbers out of hackers' hands, setting up and maintaining a customer database or any of the other complicated details that must take place behind the happy face of an ecommerce Web site if it is going to run smoothly. All Fookes does is write software and market it through a Web site that probably took no more than a few days to make.

The market for NoteTab is easily defined, so promotion for the product is relatively simple; there are several dozen software listing sites that have substantial enough readerships to worry about, and NoteTab is prominently (and correctly) listed in all of them. And, of course, it is regularly and favorably reviewed, because it is an excellent piece of software, which probably is a bigger key to its success than the Web site. But all in all, this is a near-perfect example of how to sell a product efficiently over the Internet.