If you sell products online, or if you have valuable or proprietary content hidden behind a password, you may be tempted to slap long, heavy-handed legal statements on your website. I’m not a legal expert by any stretch of the imagination, so I’m not one to vent an opinion on the necessities of online legal statements.

But I do know that, as an intensive user of the Internet, I get bombarded by them. End-user license agreements, privacy statements, legal disclaimers, copyright notices, they’re overwhelmingly abundant. And, as I’m not a lawyer, I don’t understand most of them.

These legal statements may be necessary, but that doesn’t mean your customers will read them. For some companies this is exactly the intention as they hide oppressive terms and conditions in cryptic legalese. But if you do business fairly, you may want to consider putting a human-readable version of your legal agreement on your website as well.

Creative Commons is a prime example of how you can make a legal agreement easy, even pleasant, to read. For example the Creative Commons agreement for this blog is easily read and understood. There’s also a more traditional version which you’ll agree is much harder to comprehend.

So treat your customers respectfully and tell them in plain language what their rights and obligations are. Not only will this eliminate frustration at yet another incomprehensible legal statement, it’s likely to make your customers feel more confident about doing business with you.

Make Your Legal Statements Human-Readable is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

Privacy matters to internet users. People are aware of the dangers of giving out personal information, and everyone that has an email address understands the hazards and annoyances of spam.

As a result users are less inclined to type a lot of information in a website’s form. Whether it’s a contact form or an orderform, users will be reluctant to give you their information. Many research studies show that elaborate web forms turn users away.

Every field you add to a form will make it more likely a user will not fill it in and simply go somewhere else.  Especially form fields like address and phone number throw up barriers for users that are concerned about their privacy.

It’s therefore important to keep the forms on your website as short and simple as possible. A mistake I often see is that companies base their forms on their own internal wish-list of customer information. Especially sales people want to have as much information on their customers as they can get their hands on. This usually leads to long forms that request a lot of information from users, often with little to no reward for the user when he fills it all in.

It’s necessary to use forms on your website, as a form makes it easier for a user to get in touch with you. But when you ask for much more information in the form than what you’d ask for if the customer simply phoned you, you’re not likely to get a lot of submitted forms.

Whenever you create a form for your website, keep these guidelines in mind to ensure your visitors will feel comfortable filling it in and giving you their information.

Only ask for the absolute bare minimum. For generic contact forms the name, email address and message fields are enough. For online orderforms only ask for the minimum information you need to properly complete the order process. Any additional field risks a potential customer turning away and going to a competitor.

Reward your users for giving you their information. If you really, really need to ask a lot of information from your users, give them a reward that fits the amount of information you’ve requested. This reward can be in the form of a free downloadable ebook or white paper, a possibility to win a prize like a mp3 player, or another reward that fits with your target group. Make sure this reward is clearly indicated on the form itself.

Give your form proper context and explanation. Don’t just put a form up on a web page without any explanation. The best forms are those that are short and simple and clearly indicate to the user what happens with their submitted information.

Encourage your users to submit the form. By using action words such as “submit now”, “learn more”, and “sign up today” you encourage your users to fill in the form and will make them feel good about doing so.

Include a privacy policy. Link to your privacy policy and be sure that it states you will never give your users’ information to any third party. Your privacy policy needs to be in plain language as well – hiding your intent behind cryptic legalese will not engender any trust. It also helps to state clearly on the form itself that you won’t share your users’ information.

Use a “thank you” page. When a user submits the form, send them to a “thank you” page where you confirm what you will do with their information, such as replying to the customer’s inquiry, giving them the link to the downloadable reward, enrolling them in the prize draw, etc.

Measure the submission rate.  Track how many submissions you receive compared to how many page views the form itself gets. If the submission rate is very low, you’ll need to tweak your form even more. A submission rate of 20% is a good figure for generic contact forms, so don’t be surprised if your form does a lot worse than that.

Use a simple CAPTCHA [?] to ensure your submitted forms actually come from humans instead of automated spam robots. Some CAPTCHAs are overly complex and difficult to read even for humans, which leads to real people abandoning your forms instead of just spambots.

Simple forms pay off in the long run. You may generate some additional work for yourself or your sales people with the limited information you receive, but it will result in many more contact moments with your clients and eventually in more paying customers.

Keep Your Forms Short And Simple is a post from: The Great Websites Blog

The domain name where your website resides at is an important part of your online identity. It represents your business in a vital way. Your domain name can have a big impact on the overall success of your website.

It pays off to think hard before you choose a domain name. Ideally your domain name should reflect your business’s core activities, but just having your brand name as a domain name sometimes isn’t enough. Here I will outline some things to keep in mind when you venture out and register your first domain name.

1. Pick the right extension for your primary domain name. If you run a local business that’s not in the USA, it pays off to have a domain name with your country’s local extension. So if you’re a Dutch business primarily active in the Netherlands, stick with a .nl domain name. If you do business internationally or primarily in the USA, always go for a .com domain.

Be sure to register your domain on multiple extensions to protect your online brand. Don’t rely on the .com only, also register .net, .org, .biz and .info. If you’re a European company, register the .eu as well. Register the .mobi and .asia just to be safe. You want to protect your domain name and make sure someone else doesn’t grab your domain with a different extension and starts competing with you. Have all these extra domain names point to your primary domain name where your website resides.

2. Make it easy to spell. If you have a very complicated domain name that’s hard to type, users will mistype it and get either an error or, if you’re unlucky, reach a different site entirely. So make sure your domain name is easy to type. This also helps when you have to spell it out on the phone to contacts and potential customers.

If your company has a difficult name that won’t be easily spelled as a domain, consider registering a different domain name to put your website on. You should still register your brand name as a domain, but it might be a good idea to not have that be the primary address of your website.

3. Make it easy to remember. Try to pick a domain name that’s catchy and memorable so it will stick in people’s heads. If people can’t remember your domain they might just try to find your business by searching in Google, which is likely to lead them to your competitor’s websites.

4. Don’t hyphenate unless you really have to. Hyphens, like numbers, make it more difficult for you to spell out your domain name on the phone, and makes your domain more difficult to remember. Only use hyphens to prevent confusion.

5. Make it relevant. If you’re not using your brand name as your domain, make sure your domain name applies to your business. Try to use keywords that describe your core business, but be sure to keep it short. Long domain names often don’t pass criteria 2 and 3.

6. Never use a subdomain or domain provided by your ISP. Always register your own domain name and arrange your own hosting environment. Nothing looks more amateurish than a business website on an ISP’s domain name like http://members.megaisp.com/~user101. A domain name with basic hosting is not expensive and it shows that you’ve at least put some effort into your website.

7. Register alternatives and misspellings. People make mistakes and will misremember or mistype your domain. If you own that mistyped version, you can still get that visitor to your site. Try to determine the most common variations and misspellings of your domain name and register those domains as well.

8. Avoid existing brand names or competitors. Many lawsuits have been fought over domain name ownership, and if you pick a domain name that resembles an existing business or brand too much you’re likely to find yourself on the wrong end of a legal settlement.

Your domain name is not the be all, end all of your online presence, but it’s a big factor and deserves proper consideration.

Choosing The Right Domain Name is a post from: The Great Websites Blog