News To Use

Welcome to the March 2007 edition of ChamberExpress™ News to Use. Our goal:  provide ideas, information and news to help chambers of commerce succeed online.

In This Edition

1. Best Practice: Quality Copy
2. Tools of the Trade:  Credibility Essentials
3. News from ChamberExpress™:  Coast-to-Coast Client List Grows

1. Best Practices:  Quality Copy
Imagine this scenario –a beautiful website, filled with lovely graphics, captures a potential customer’s attention.  But then, she starts reading the content, becomes disinterested and leaves.  Don’t let this happen to your site – make sure your content not only attracts visitors but keeps them reading!

• Get into the mind of your visitor.  Write as if you are sitting next to him/her explaining your chamber and all you have to offer.
• Make your copy more personal by writing in first person – I, you or your.
• Keep it simple – write as if communicating with a 13 year old.  Avoid complicated words or explanations.
• Convey emotion.  People on the web are often in a great hurry, so appeal to their emotions to stop them clicking away to the next site. Use stories, convey your experiences or include testimonies from others.
• Communicate quickly and efficiently. People online tend to scan rather than read everything on the page, therefore, use single lines of text for your headings, bullet-pointed lists and short, active words in your sentences.
• Keep paragraphs short – no more than two to five sentences.
• Make clear points with each paragraph you write.  Each paragraph should build on the previous one, so that you are pulling your visitor through your page naturally.

* Excerpted from a web article by Herman Drost.

 2. Tools of the Trade:  Credibility Essentials

Anyone can put up a website, but visitors must be able to believe there's a credible organization behind your site, one that is reliable and trustworthy.  Here are some tips for building a web site your visitors and members can trust.

• Studies indicate that the most important criteria of web credibility is the way the site looks. Create a great first impression by having a crisp, professional layout with sharp graphics.
• Remember that your site is your organization's online representation - it's essential that it matches in look and quality to the rest of your marketing materials.
• Provide links on your site to other reputable web sites that reference your organization.
• Create a page with an overview of the chamber's history and staff bios. People tend to trust others if they know something about them.
• Provide information that shows your organization as being firmly established within your community and in the business world in general, such as member lists, testimonials and/or a “latest news” section.
• Ensure that there are no dead links. Dead links are frustrating and can tells visitors that you don’t care enough to regularly update your site.
• Make it very easy to contact you, and send out an automatic confirmation e-mail when someone does contact you.

* Excerpted from a web article by Trenton Moss.

 3. News from ChamberExpress™:  Coast-to-Coast Client List Grows

Welcome to two new clients in the ChamberExpress™ family:  the Crestview Area (FL) Chamber of Commerce, and the Greek-American Chamber of Commerce.

Joanne Taylor, president of ACT, said in making the announcement, “We are delighted to add these two chambers to our growing client community. I think that the expertise we bring in making an organization’s web site a more efficient and user friendly element in their operations is unique. And our clients quickly realize how easy it is to maintain and up date their sites after we’ve done our job. When we’re done, you can truly do it yourself.”

The executives of both chambers expressed their excitement about the new technologies that will make their respective sites so much better for their customers.

Wayne Harris, executive director of the Crestview Chamber, admitted that while their current web site was good, it was also limited. He and the chamber’s board decided they needed to bring the chamber “into the 21^st century.” Phil Conner, a member of their board and a computer consultant himself, “…was very impressed with the [ChamberExpress™] software and how it runs and with the ease of use. It will be very easy for the chamber staff to update the site on a regular basis,” said Harris. “Before, we had to go through the web master, because that was how the infrastructure was created, and it could take days to do an update. Now – less than 30 seconds! It’s great!”

George Papaioannou, president of the Greek-American Chamber of Commerce, located in Kearny, New Jersey, explained that one of the most important functions of their site had to be an ability for chamber members and visitors to be able to network through the site. A regional organization with the primary goal of helping Greek-American business people to connect, Papaioaniou expects the group to become a part of the national scene, and the newly designed web site will help them accomplish that goal.

“We chose ChamberExpress™ to design our new site because of their specific expertise with chambers of commerce. They have learned what works and what doesn’t and that is evident in their work,” explained Papaioaniou.

“We wanted to make the site easier for our people to update and ‘make changes on the fly,’ and ChamberExpress™ will give up that capability. The site will be much more interactive and that will serve our members in a much more efficient manner," he added.

Know a chamber that can benefit from a web site redesign? Send a message to info(at)chamberexpress.com and we'll give them a free assessment to get them started toward a better way of doing business online.

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