Providing the “Table Stakes” for your Corporate Website (Pt. 2)
Previously, I started talking about the basics your corporate site has to have to provide the information your customers will be looking for on your site. The list continues here:
Contact information
This is an easy one, but there are so many corporate websites that overlook it. The basics to provide on this page are:
- A real street address for your head office and all regional offices
- Real contact email addresses for Sales, Support, Questions, Press, General. By real, I mean an email address that is monitored and responded to by a human being within 48 hours. And that response needs to be human, relevant to the question or comment, with a real person’s name and response address attached to it.
- A job board that is current. No old and filled jobs. All current openings posted. An email address to contact for each position (please don’t use one of those generic recruiting services that make the applicant fill out generic questionnaires. Instead, provide an email address to reply.
- A phone number for each office and for general inquiries that is staffed by a human.
If someone is going to your Contact Information, they obviously want to contact you. Make it as easy as possible.
Frequently Asked Questions
This could be an offshoot of your Contact Page, but the FAQ needs to be questions that are… er… Frequently Asked. This is not the place to include puffery or sales/marketing speak. Answer the questions here and you’ll save yourself having to respond to dozens or hundreds of the same requests. Give the answers a human voice. Written by a real person. A mild sense of humour here doesn’t hurt if the questions are not serious.
Latest News
If you’re big enough, you’ve been in the news lately. This is the place to link to all the articles in the newspapers and top blogs. If it’s positive, you can thank them. If it’s critical, it’s a great place to respond to it. This is the toughest one, as many companies have a deep-seated fear of drawing attention to criticism, let alone responding to it publicly.
If you want your corporate website to be viewed as anything other than biased marketing fluffery, these are the basic things it needs to include. If you want to take it to the next level and actually interact with your customers, the company needs to take a deep breath, cast aside some basic corporate fears, and dip the corporate toe into this thing called Social Networking.
