Late last fall a lunch with a MANA member brought the following request: “If you see something wrong with my website, please let me know about it.” The request was made when conversation turned to the subject of web page content and presentation. The concerns that surfaced during that lunch recalled an article that appeared in Agency Sales more than a decade ago entitled “Your Website Bites!”

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That article pointed out that with some notable exceptions, independent manufacturers’ representatives haven’t harnessed the potential of the Internet to serve the interests of individual firms — nor have many steered visitors to the information about the rep function on the site of their associations, e.g., MANA, NEMRA, ERA, MAFSI, IHRA, PTRA, AIM/R, ISA, etc.

While the author of the article noted that it was relatively easy to list specific mistakes, the over-arching missing element seems to be a clear sense of why a rep has a site in the first place. Too many reps appear to have gone online without knowing why. Even if your site is only a glorified poster, you need it to convey the correct message about your company. If your site does nothing more, it needs to establish trust in the mind of your visitor.

It’s important to identify what your goal is for your site and what you are proactively doing in order to measure your results as they relate to that goal. Who comprises the primary audience you want your site to reach? What are you doing to get them to your website? Are you after casual surfers — in which case you should be optimizing the search engine pick-up — or are you primarily interested in the prompt and efficient delivery of information to people you already know and whom you send to the site?

The author noted that in his wanderings on the Internet, he saw only one site making a major effort at providing what he called “backroom efficiency” for exchange of specific, transactional information with principals and customers. That falls within the purview of what he described as two main goals for a rep website — helping customers or acquiring principals.

They are not mutually exclusive, and he opined that the best way a site can help attract new principals was by demonstrating how effectively the agency serves its customers.

In terms of specific mistakes he encountered during his web tour:

• Amateurish or dated graphics. You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.
• Non-functional opening page, telling visitors to “enter here.” They have already entered in their own minds; why are you making them do so again?
• Failure to provide convenient or intuitive navigation.
• Visitor counts: That’s nobody’s business but yours.
• “Last update” information that is far in the past. Your visitor will trust the currency of information on an updated page a lot more than on a page last updated in 2001.
• Flash or other motion, or sound effects that don’t add and only distract.
• Pages marked “under construction” or “coming soon.” Neither of these provide for the visitor’s immediate need which is current information.

Adding to the above, here are a couple of suggestions that have been offered by additional experts:

• Probably the most common error spotted on MANA-members’ websites is the very name of their profession — “manufacturer.” A good deal of time it’s misspelled as “manufacture.” If the rep carries just one line, the agency is probably correctly called a “manufacturer’s representative.” If, however, it works with several principals, it is a “manufacturers’ representative.”
• If you’re going to provide an area for “contacts” on a website, most consultants advise that you actually have an individual’s name and direct contact point.
• Beware of confusion among certain words that are absolute “red flags” for experienced “wordsmiths.” For instance, know when and how to use “compliment” vs. “complement”; “further” vs. “farther”; “its” vs. “it’s”; and believe it or not, it’s not uncommon to spot misuse of “their,” “there” and “they’re,” not to mention “to,” “too” and “two.” [Editor’s tip: One of the most valuable spelling/grammar usage books is Woe Is I, by Patricia O’Conner. (Riverhead Books, 281 pages, available in hardcover, paperback and eTextbook.]
• And finally, there’s always the danger of turning over the creation and/or the maintenance of a website to that friend or relative who says they know just what to do. There’s just about universal agreement among experts, consultants and practitioners that if you want it done right, have it done by a professional.

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