Now is the best time to improve your internet investment!

In today's business climate, when every "non-essential" budget item is a cost-cutting target, how will your investment in an internet presense fare?

Do you spend hundreds of dollars every month for a yellow-pages ad, but are unwilling to make your website a welcoming and useful destination? What about that fancy brochure in those boxes in the corner of your office - is it available for download on your website? Sure you need a yellow-pages listing and a brochure, but a successful business also needs to complete the picture with a website that encapsulates your brand image and rewards the user with a rich experience.

If you already have a website, does it make sense to drop any more time or money into it?

We sure think so. More than ever before, potential retail customers and professional clients look to the internet for basic information about your business. Instead of ignoring the internet, people are still increasing the hours they spend online. More Americans are spending more money online. More households have broadband access. The crash of the dot.coms was not the crash of the internet.

Construct believes that now is the time to improve your internet investment by updating a first-generation, "let's get something, anything up on the web" kind of site into a useful resource for customers. In every case, your website can be the ultimate destination for potential clients, current customers, your employees and your sales force.

Here are seven lessons that you can use to improve your internet investment:

Internet Investment Lesson One: Every business has a personality.
Everything your customer sees should reflect that personality. Call it branding or just call it common sense, but make sure your website looks like you thought long and hard about everything on it.

Internet Investment Lesson Two: Useful content is the currency of the internet.
Make your website useful. Think like a potential client: what do I want to know about these people and how can they help me? Then make that information available in an engaging, readable format.

Internet Investment Lesson Three: Don't hide your assets, leverage them.
Do you have a video clip that shows your products? A sound file of your best salesman's one-minute pitch? Pictures? Product descriptions? Data sheets? Technical specs? Not everyone will want to look at all your stuff, but they could, and why not offer it?

Internet Investment Lesson Four: You've heard about investment banking; think about information banking.
Invest in the future of your business by making your website an information bank for your whole organization. Offer that form that everybody seems to need all the time as a .pdf file; users fill in the blanks and print it out. There are ways that every business can use the unique media that a well-crafted website can offer.

Internet Investment Lesson Five: People first.
Usability is very very important. Viewers want to know, right away, that they have come to the right place. Offer useful information about your business and how it can help them; keep the home page simple; provide a hierarchy of information; make the navigation categories intuitive. You have very little time to make a first impression.

Internet Investment Lesson Six: Make it pay.
Can your website become a revenue source? It's not necessary to start an online store, but make it worthwhile for clients to use your website. Online forms save time for everyone and streamline the sales process. The time you save with data collected via your website can add up to real dollars.

Internet Investment Lesson Seven: Tell everybody you have a website.
Of course, your website address is on every ad that goes out, all your stationery, business cards and forms. But is your web address on your trucks? On your front window? In trade directories and Chamber of Commerce listings? Can you get business partners to provide a link to your website from theirs? Increasingly, internet search engines improve your ranking by looking at how many times your site is linked to from other sites.

Your new website will have personality. It will be content-rich, leveraging marketing assets and becoming an information bank with great usability. It might even pay for itself, especially if you tell everyone about it. Construct can make it happen with the special insight that our years of experience will bring to your project.

The next Views column talks about how to maximize your results on search engines. Yeah, everyone's talking about it and lots of companies are making money off of it, but can you? We'll tell you when, why and how. Keep in touch.

Other Views columns were titled About the Internet, this Site and Communication, The Importance of Clarity and Craft in Today's Marketplace, Is There Really Anything All That New About New Media? and Now is the Best Time to Improve Your Internet Investment!.