"The Desktop Global Marketer" (tm)

   A free on-line newsletter of Sidereal Designs, Inc.,
   for Internet Entrepreneurs, and those who are
   considering becoming one.
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                  September 7th, 1998
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   "The Desktop Global Marketer" is free, and may be 
   re-published freely with permission. We encourage 
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   newsletter.

   For any other purpose, please write to:
   	jamie(at)siderealdesigns.com
   Or visit us at:
   	http://siderealdesigns.com
_____________________________________________________

A professional's web site.

What should a good web-site supporting an individual professional
practice have? This question has been asked of us recently in
different forms by several of our readers, so we'll give our view on
the matter in this edition. (In a future edition we'll deal similarly
with small-business and entrepreneurial sites.)

There are three basic questions you should always ask when building
any new site. The first is "What is the purpose of this site?" For an
individual professional, one answer is almost always to attract new
clients and promote your services to them. "Attract" and "promote"
are two different agendas, and sometimes they can be in
conflict. Another purpose is usually to help maintain contact with
existing clients. For some professions the web may also serve the
purpose of delivery of services in whole or in part to remote clients.

The second question is "Who are your site's visitors?" In the case of
a site dealing with professional services, your visitors have probably
come either because they know that they have need of your type of
service and are seeking to select a provider, or because they think
that they may need a professional in your field and are seeking more
information in order to find out. You'll need to deal with both of
these cases.

The third question is "What information does this site need to
provide, and what information does it need to collect?"  Answering
this question in the context of the first two will tell you the kinds
of things that you will want included in your site. With this list in
hand, you need to then group the elements into related functional
units that can stand alone conceptually, for your visitors may
traverse your site in any sequence that suits them. 

The result will pretty much correspond to your list of potential
individual pages, and will practically accomplish the top-level design
of the site for you. If you mix these functions together on
"all-purpose" pages your site will lose focus and become
confusing. (Other issues such as clear navigational links, well
thought-out sequencing and site maps are also essential, and you can
read our thoughts on them at
http://siderealdesigns.com/quality.shtml, but they are not part of
the top-level design.)  Let's try to apply this approach to the case
of an individual professional's site.

Every site must have an initial or "home" page to receive visitors who
enter your domain name into their browsers. The clear function of this
page must be to introduce the rest of the site, to give the visitor
enough information to decide if they want to visit the rest of the
site, to help them find their way to what they want, and to persuade
them to view other things which they may not have come for but which
you want them to look at. It should be a preview of the other pages of
the site.

One of your objectives will be to sell your product. In the case of a
professional who provides a novel or unusual service, the service
itself may be part of the product that needs selling, in other cases
not; people pretty much know already what a doctor or dentist or
psychologist or accountant or lawyer does. But in all cases, a major
part of the product is you. The idea you need to sell is that you are
the person they want to retain. For this reason, presenting
information about you is an important function of your site, and we
always recommend a biographical page for service professionals.

This page is where you present your qualifications, training, and
accomplishments. A photograph of yourself is important, either here or
on the home page, or both. Your looks have nothing to do with your
qualifications, but people will just feel more comfortable if they
have a mental image to associate with those sterling credentials. This
page is also a good place to present your personal philosophy of
approach to your practice: the intangibles that may differentiate you
from other equally well-qualified competitors.

A closely-related body of information is examples or evaluations of
your past work. For some professions such as architecture this may be
very straightforward to present on a web site. For others the best
thing is a list of clients you've worked with who would be willing to
recommend you. For still others, a collection of testimonials may be
most appropriate. 

In some cases this material can be combined comfortably into a page
such as the biographical/qualifications page, but if it is extensive
it should have a page of its own. Our data on paths that people take
when navigating sites suggest that they conceptualize this as a
stand-alone category of relevant information.

Another important function is a page explaining (as opposed to
selling) your service or profession. This will be the page visited by
the person who is trying to understand if your services will address
their problem. If your service is novel or not well-known this page is
mandatory, but even if people can be expected to have a reasonable
idea of what you do and what services you provide, they may still not
have the whole picture or may have an inaccurate picture. A page
devoted to offering information about your profession or service may
persuade a client who discovers some unexpected value, and may serve
to put unfounded concerns to rest for others.

One of the most important issues for a web page is ability to attract
repeat visits. Almost no one will become your client on the first
visit unless they have decided in advance to do so and are simply
using the web as a convenient means to contact you. They will look at
what you have to say and then move on. Some pages they visit they will
bookmark and return to, and eventually they will become the clients of
the proprietor of one of those pages. You want to make certain they
have a reason to return to yours. 

A beautifully-designed home page with stunning graphics will NOT
suffice; you need meat. The traditional way to do this is to offer
something useful and free. There's an "Ask the Webmaster" button on my
site. Push it and you get a form to fill out with your question or
problem, and I then email you an answer or my best advice for
free. The moment someone is actually ready to start a site and has a
specific question is the moment they're going to remember that button,
and it's the moment I want them to re-visit my site.  

Information, advice, relevant links, helpful charts and guides,
reviews, documents that can be downloaded and printed out are all
examples of things that you probably have in abundance and can give
away for free. Do so and people will return. Update and expand a page
with a collection of these regularly and they will return
regularly. Each time they do, you get another crack at persuading
them, and you start to build a relationship. 

Something as simple as a page of recommended books on your specialty
that are appropriate for the layman will do as a start. I keep a page
called "useful stuff" that is just an eclectic collection of things
I've found that could be useful to someone starting a web site. Every
time I come across a good new item, I add it. It's right up there with
"Services and Fees" (which everybody looks at) in terms of visitor
traffic through my site.

A newsletter is a dynamic and proactive extension of this
idea. Instead of luring them to come back to you, you go to them. Your
newsletter should give your expertise away for free just as you give
it away on your web site. Strictly speaking, you don't have to have a
website to run a newsletter, but they are closely related.

A website provides you with the machinery to publish a newsletter, and
with the machinery to take subscriptions in an automated fashion
twenty-four hours a day, and also acts as a medium for introducing and
promoting your newsletter. Your website provides a place where people
can download documents or images that you discuss in your newsletter
but which are inappropriate to send in mass mailings. Your newsletter
in turn promotes your website by reminding people of it, and invites
them to return and read about your practice.

Your newsletter should have at least one page and probably two pages
devoted to it; one to describe it and let people decide if it's
appropriate for them, and another to actually take subscriptions and
collect demographic information about your subscribers. These
functions can be combined, especially if you're willing to forego a
long form that asks for lots of information about your subscribers
(which most of them will decline to fill out in any case.) 

However the cost difference between the one and two-page approaches is
negligible since it is the subscription infrastructure that is
time-consuming to build, and the subscription page is rarely fancy. As
a matter of aesthetics and convenience for the user I prefer to use a
separate page for subscription forms.

A primary function of your site is helping people get in contact with
you. Make it easy for them; many people will visit your web page just
looking for your phone number. If you just have a phone and an
address, put it on every page. If you have a more varied and complex
suite of contact options, devote a page to helping people reach you or
get information to you, and put a link to it on every page.

If your profession or service involves a great deal of communication
with clients, or if what you provide is primarily information (even if
you eventually real-mail something at the end of the process,) then
you may want to consider making your web site part of your delivery
system. One very good reason for doing this is to expand your
potential market from your local environment to the whole world. 

A web site can be a central integration point for many kinds of
interactive communication. It can support real-time typed dialogue for
individual or group meetings with chat-room facilities, and it can
support email-based distributions and communications in a rich variety
of ways. It can serve as an adjunct to telephone or bridge-line
communications by providing a repository for graphics and documents
which can be examined during or after voice communication. It can
serve as a drop-off and pick-up point for documents transmitted by FTP
(file transfer protocol) in any format, not just those appropriate to
display on the web or inclusion in email. All of these functions can
be provided in pages which may either be publicly-accessible, or
accessible only to those you select.

In most instances, a professional's site will differ from a merchant's
site in that there is little need for pages to collect funds
on-site. Contracting for professional services is usually not
impulse-buying, nor time-critical with respect to funds-transfer,
although if you want to sell books or tapes it may be an
exception. This is your good fortune, for going first-class with
on-site, automated credit card transactions is a major undertaking. On
the other hand, a page discussing your rates or fees may be both
appropriate and beneficial, and I guarantee you everyone will look at
it.

Beyond these basic items, your site may have idiosyncratic needs, and
they may even be the most important focus of your site, but what I
have presented here is a good core around which to consider building
your web presence. Remember to begin with these questions: "What is
the purpose of this site?" "Who are this site's visitors?" "What
information does this site need to provide, and what information does
it need to collect?"

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"Sidereal" is pronounced sy-DEER-ee-all, and means "of
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