Some web sites have an ‘about us’ page, while many don’t.

When I’m searching for a product or service online, I like to know who I’m dealing with.

First, I look for contact details, eg phone number and address, reasoning that a business with a landline number and a physical location seems more permanent than one without these. Now I know that’s not always the case, but it helps to establish trust, especially if I have to hand over my credit card details to make a purchase.

Often I’ll then go to the ‘about us’ page to get an idea of the business I’ll be buying from. This page offers a great opportunity to introduce yourself, your expertise and experience, and how you run your business.

One of the big problems with online purchases is sorting out problems. How many times have we banged our heads against a wall when emails to sale@ or support@ go unanswered and phone calls go through to voicemail, sometimes for days?

I’ve often abandoned good-looking sites without purchasing because there’s no contact details or any suggestion of how the site owner runs the business. It can be too much of a risk to buy from them.

Providing these details is no guarantee of good service, but it does suggest that the web site owner considers customer service important. It helps to build trust and could determine whether a customer buys or not.

An ‘about us’ page gives customers the chance to ‘like’ you. And even if you don’t like this concept, we all know from facebook how powerful the idea can be in people’s minds.

So what is it about you that makes your customer buy?

Posted via email from z2zine

In 1985 British Airways promoted me to the grand position of Sales Information Officer. What did that mean? I don’t think anyone knew. I wasn’t sure myself.

In fact, we were a small department, a colleague and I, who had been recruited to develop the BA Prestel site into an online catalogue. Prestel was the British Telecom videotext system (like Ceefax and Oracle) but more flexible and responsive. 95% of UK travel agents used it to book package tours. BA decided that, as agents already used the system, it should develop its own site to sell scheduled air travel services to agents.

And so we set about developing what grew into a 7,000-screen online brochure with full details of the product illustrated by heavily pixelated diagrams and illustrations. I spent months creating fares tables and editing fare rules for every fare BA sold for travel from the UK to its worldwide destinations. I think the fares section ran to 2,000 pages.

An article in BA's TOPICall magazine from way back in 1985.

What seemed amazing at the time was to be able to upload pages from our PC network (an IBM AT PC with a 20MB hard disk linked to two twin-floppy IBM XT PCs) via modem down an ordinary telephone line. It seemed magical that one second the page was on my PC and the next it was accessible for anyone to view on Prestel.

It all seemed so exciting. People could even send us messages, which we printed off on a thermal printer.

But Prestel was not the way forward. Few in the airline saw its potential and both my colleague and I eventually moved to other jobs in BA.

We had been 10 years too early. Later, as the internet developed and web sites appeared, I realised that we had built a massive web site before anyone knew what it was.

I also learned a lot about writing for the small screen, on-screen attention spans and other tips that would stand me in good stead as the world moved online.

It may have been crude compared with today’s technology, but it was exciting for us as we made the rules up as we went along.

Posted via web from z2zine