By: Scott Offord

With many thousands of business websites already strutting their stuff in cyberspace, is there any sign that the Internet’s business saturation point is being reached? Not a one. On the contrary, there are excellent reasons to believe that we are still early in the game of business Web marketing. There are still tens if not hundreds of thousands of businesses that have minimal Web presence or none at all.

If your company has no website yet, or if you’re dissatisfied with what you have and want to re-create it, realize that one of your main challenges is how to distinguish yourself in the increasingly crowded playing field that is the World Wide Web. In addressing this challenge, it’s crucial to keep in mind two things: the image you want to portray on the Web and the unique selling points that make your business different from others. Join those two together, make them interlock, and you will be well on your way to creating a site that represents your company’s essence while making you stand out in the crowd.

Determine Your Image

Your company most likely fits somewhere between two extremes. Over the years, you have built a reputation within your industry and are frequently sought out for your expertise or your quality goods. Or you have seen the great opportunity that a particular industry offers and fairly recently entered the field. In either case, and anywhere in between, as a small business owner it’s essential to ask yourself, “How do I want my company to be perceived on the Web?”

Whether yours is an older or a newer company, your website is the 24-hour face you present to the world. If your company has an established image, it’s important that your site doesn’t clash with, but instead enhances that image. If your business is new and your image not yet established, your website can be a key factor in developing your company’s look and feel.

No matter which end of the spectrum you are closest to, an experienced web designer can help. Whether working closely with an established business owner or a hopeful entrepreneur, the web designer’s job is to arrange the given content in the most attractive and effective manner. For the established company, it will likely be important to carry over the same look and feel online that the business shows in person, paper, and other media. To that end, the company might provide photos, graphics, and an exact color scheme for its website. The entrepreneur, on the other hand, may not have an established brand or public identity. Thus, the web designer may need to locate appropriate photography, create custom graphics, or even assist in designing a new logo.

To prepare for discussions with your web designer about image, think hard about your company, how others perceive it, and how you want them to perceive it. Pick out your favorite colors, or even better, the favorite colors of your best customers. Think about the impact your company has made on its existing clients or customers, or how you hope it will begin to make an impact. Pondering these issues is equally important whether you have an established business or are still finding your legs. If your company is well established, it’s important that the website dovetails well with the reputable image you have created. If your business is newer, even if you have only a few employees, your site can be constructed so that it provides you with an engaging new image that provides you with almost immediate reputability. A small company may not be able to compete with a large company in terms of impressive buildings but even a one- or two-person company, with some careful thought and planning, can show the world a website that is as sophisticated and impressive as a Fortune 500 company’s site. In that way, the Internet is a medium that helps even up the playing field for businesses in every phase of development. Whatever your position in the spectrum your thinking will pay off when you and your designer are able to work synergistically to create a site that presents the face you want your website visitors to see.

Determine Your Unique Selling Points

As you consult with your designer about the Web image you want to portray, you should also be working on the all-important issue of the content you will present to visitors. Here again, the idea is to differentiate yourself from your competition. To do that, it’s essential that you get clear on how your business offerings, whether they are products or services, differ from what your competitors offer. Figuring this out goes beyond knowing your general market niche, which may be anything from selling sweaters to plumbing supplies to pizzas, or offering services from tanning to financial to janitorial. You need to understand clearly the advantages and benefits your company has over competitors in your same niche. What makes buying sweaters or pizzas from your store a wiser choice than buying them from your competitors’ outlets? Is it quality, cost, a personable staff, or something else that makes you shine? Or why should someone opt for your financial or janitorial services instead of the competition’s? Do you offer timely service, guarantees, or expertise that the others can’t touch?

Understanding how your products or services are a wiser purchase than those of your competitors’ will help you not only in developing your website content, it will also aid in writing clever and catchy ads that can be used in search engine advertising. Clarifying the unique advantages your company offers to its customers can help you target specific groups of people more effectively and increase your return on investment. The bottom line is that conveying your unique qualities strongly on your website will help differentiate what you can provide from what others offer and thereby help you stand out in the crowd.

Determining what makes your business unique has a benefit beyond enabling you to realize what qualities you should emphasize on your website. It also helps you to clarify selling points that you may not be taking sufficient advantage of in your other marketing efforts. Far from being a stand-alone marketing tool with only tangential relation to your other operations, your Web efforts should be integrated with the rest of your business. You can learn a lot about what you should have on your website by considering the details of your business. And you may learn some things about how to improve your business as a whole by having to explain on your website, sometimes in just a few pages, the specific reasons customers should buy from you.

A Great Tool: Research Your Competition

In contemplating how to distinguish yourself from your niche-peers, it helps to do your research. Find out how competitors in your area present themselves on their websites. Are they making themselves stand out from the crowd by emphasizing their unique qualities? What do they say about themselves and what do they offer? Comparing competitors’ websites can help you clarify the focus and design of your own site, suggesting qualities to emphasize and the best way to present those qualities.

Visits to others’ websites will also help you understand the overall quality of your competitors’ Web presence. For each site, ask yourself, “Is this website professional-looking and appealing? Can the visitor to the site find information easily? Does the website make the company look established and credible?” If you answer “yes” to any of those questions for any competitor’s website, then you need a site that does at least as well. Also, for each site you visit, decide what you think are its positive and negative features. Discuss these features with your web developer. Does he or she agree with you? Why or why not? Between the two of you, hammer out an architecture and design for your website that focuses on the strengths of your company and also avoids mistakes that your competitors may have made in their web design.

Interlock Image and Content, and Voila!

On the Web, image and content go hand-in-hand. You can’t have one without the other. In fact, each one can profoundly affect the other. For instance, it’s possible for your logos and trademarks to get lost in too much text. Generally, long, uninterrupted stretches of text should be avoided on business sites unless there’s some strong reason. Easily-read sentences and paragraphs surrounded with sufficient white space are more inviting to visitors and can help to enhance your design. The mistake can also go the other way. Images that are too large, gaudy, or numerous can distract from your message.

The artful interlocking of image and content is where your web designer can shine. He or she can help you to combine your selling points in the most effective way with the colors, logos, textures, and other design elements that you have chosen. Your goal is to get to the point where the unique image you decided to portray is engagingly interlocked with the unique selling points you want your visitors to be aware of. At that point, voila! You are likely soon to be the proud owner of an outstanding website that distinguishes your company from its competition.