Any business owner who thinks their marine business can survive without a website, or get by with one that's little more than a shell with the store location and hours, is not only fooling themselves but missing out on sales.

Your website is your online storefront.  As a business, you already invest considerable time and effort into sales training and maintaining an attractive retail location to improve your customer's buying experience. Your website needs to reflect your bricks-and-mortar operation in every sense. After all, your website is there to generate business.

Build Your Website For Your Customer, Not For You

It seems straightforward, but it is amazing how many websites are designed to be convenient for the website owner, rather than for their customers. Rather than viewing the website as just another pain in the neck, consider it as a second location for your business. If you were to open a second location, you would obviously want it to be approachable and inviting for your customers. You would want to create an environment where they can find what they need quickly, then pay for it easily. You would want it to effectively serve their needs, so they will come back another day and buy something else from you. So why not give your website the same treatment?

Try this simple test. Ask yourself – why, exactly, would a customer come to your website in the first place?

If you are a chandlery or marine parts and accessory store, the customer needs to know where you are located and what your hours of operation are, as well as what products you sell. At its most basic level, your website needs to provide that basic information. But why not go one better, and provide a simple way for the customer to actually buy the products?

If you are a marina, the customer might want to know what services you offer, how many slips you have, or if you can accommodate a particularly large vessel. Does your website answer these most basic questions? The answers should be easy to find – don't make your customer hunt for them.

If you are a dealer, your prospective customer will want to know what products you sell. Apart from just a listing of brand names, won't they want to know what you have in inventory? And what about service?

Try viewing your website through your customer's eyes, then back that up with some actual research. You may want to actually poll a small group of real customers, asking them specific questions about what they want to see on your website. The answers might surprise you.

If a visitor to your website can't find what they're looking for fairly easily, they will simply leave. It's no different than if they walk in the front door of your physical location and  nobody approaches them. Congratulations – you may have just lost a sale.

Make It Easy To Read

No one wants to have to read through page after page of descriptive babble, so get right to the point. Make the website easy to read. Use fonts that are clear and easy to read, and make sure the text is large enough no one needs to reach for their eyeglasses. Rather than dive into long-winded spiels about all the things that you do, give them enough information to paint  a basic picture, and invite the customer to contact you for more details.

It's important to keep everything 'above the fold.' If you don't see something on your computer screen, do you automatically scroll down? Not necessarily, so the important stuff should always appear right at the top where it won't be missed. Use headlines and subheads; bullet points and 'anchor' texts' (those highlighted pieces of copy that take you to another page when you click them). Make it easy to navigate.

If people are coming to your website, it's because they are looking for you to solve a problem. So let the customer know how you will solve it, and why you are best qualified to help. If you've been in business for 30 years, or are the number one dealer for XYZ products in Canada, be sure to let them know. If you write the same way as you would speak to the customer face-to-face, you can accomplish this without going overboard or sounding boastful.

Make It Easy To Use

If a visitor to your website has to guess where things are, chances are they simply won't bother, and will simply bounce along to another website that is easier to navigate. When the user arrives at your site, they should immediately be able to figure out what kind of business you operate, what you can do for them, how they can contact you and how they can do business with you.

Follow the standard navigation panels that all other websites do. There's no advantage to being cute or different.  All it does is complicates things for your customer. If a customer comes to your website and can't figure out how to find the information they're looking for, they're not going to invest a lot of effort to figure it out. Most likely, they'll say 'forget this' and try one of your competitors instead.

Make It Fast

The web has brought us the 'instantaneous' world. Speed – or more precisely, a lack of it – kills. It is essential you make your web pages load quickly on the screen. Avoid using large, high-resolution graphics that may look nice, but take forever to display.  Usability studies have confirmed that memory-gobbling 'flash' graphics at the beginning of a website don't enhance the user experience. In fact, users tend to bounce because they think they have arrived at the wrong site, or they immediately hit the 'skip' button to avoid viewing the flash graphic entirely.

Worse yet, it's not just website visitors that avoid these false fronts. Search engines do not read the pictures either – they can only read text. If the search engine can't read your page, it won't promote it to people who search for it. Search engines use electronic page scanning mechanisms (called search engine spiders) to determine what's on a given website, in order to recall it later when someone completes a matching web search. If the spider can't read your flash page, it will likely avoid your website altogether. In effect, by investing in fancy flash graphics to make your site look fancy you are putting up roadblocks to having your website promoted by search engines. Woops!

Keep Your Website Current

Whether it's a price list, FAQs, inventory listings, an event calendar or a blog, you have to keep things current. Nobody wants to read information about events that happened three years ago. It also begs the question as to what else on your site is badly out of date. Or, if you're still in business at all.

Test, Test, Test!

With the analytics programs that are widely available from Google and other sources, it's easy to monitor activity on your website. If you decide to set up an online chandlery, your analytics can tell you how many people are visiting various parts of your site. The analytic program can tell you how far buyers are travelling through the buying process, and if they are or aren't buying. That's powerful stuff. Wouldn't you want to know that people like your online store, but for some reason they aren't buying from it? You have the opportunity change it, to see if something else works better. And, you can make changes very quickly and see the results right away.

You don't have time for all this stuff, you say? Sorry my friend, but you don't have any choice. The internet is here to stay, and it's becoming more relevant to your business every day. Your website is no longer about just providing information – it's about building relationships with your online users, and turning them into paying customers.
Fortunately for us, we are in the sales and customer service business – our lives are all about relationship building. In the coming months, we will explore the internet further, and cut through the mumbo-jumbo to understand exactly how you can make the most of this opportunity to better serve your existing customers and develop entirely new ones.

Heather Robertson is a Digital Communications Consultant specializing in online marketing and communications for small business. The former publisher of Boat for Sale magazine and BFS Online, Heather may be reached at heather.s.robertson@gmail.com.